Toadies, The Charmer (Spaceflight Records)

I mentioned this album the other week in mindless passing, which is of course how I roll in the Playlist column. Mind you, for the record, the column’s review snippets reflect cursory, usually distracted first glances as opposed to overly long Pitchfork-style essay contest research; after all, the Playlist thingies mostly focus on advance singles, which often do suck, as any reader who has any musical taste whatsoever knows only too well. So yeah, I wasn’t impressed with this album’s title track, and am still not, but sure, there’s a lot here to like. If you don’t know, the band’s from Fort Worth, Texas, where they started as a late-’80s grunge act with a rugged, brazen southern twist, and they still have a pretty fierce following (which has nothing to do with why I gave this one a more thorough examination; that has more to do with an odd sequence of events). Any-freakin’-way, they’re usually accused of sounding like Nirvana (which I don’t agree with at all) or Pixies (slightly more accurate), but overall, I’d characterize them more as a three-way between Danzig, Pennywise and Pavement, the latter sound of which explains why I didn’t like the title track. Not exactly my jam, but on second glance it’s hard and raw and slovenly enough that I must dutifully rubber-stamp their hall pass. A-

Slim Volume, Off The Grid (self-released)

You know, folks, it’s about time I started getting some albums from serious local-to-NH bands like this one, who, like Lee & Dr. G (an arena-blues band whose album I reviewed last month), did a big album-release gig in Concord at the BNH Stage. I mean, not to make this column about me (which, OK, it really is), but yeah, it’s been very weird for me not to be inundated with promo stuff from local bands trying to get some love in this newspaper. Of course, I attribute all the shunning I’ve received to the fact that New Hampshirites have a fierce allergy to anything from Massachusetts, which includes me (I must admit the feeling’s been mutual for years, ever since the half-decade I spent in Portsmouth, N.H., where I was routinely exposed to some of the most boring fedora-hatted bar bands ever put together). So yeah, I’ve been snobby, but these guys, like L&DG, do have some potential to bring in some actual big-time record company interest (I mean come on, it happened in Seattle, so it conceivably could happen here). OK, anyway, these guys. Regular shows at Strange Brew in Manchvegas to start, where they refined their sound, which isn’t fedora-hatted at all but assuredly is deeply and accurately commercial. There’s some Tom Petty in their sound, which any idiot could identify, and some Michael McDonald yacht rock, but there’s also a northernized Kings Of Leon/Mumfords edge to it, some Minus The Bear, and (I could hardly believe this) songwriting that’s on the level of one of my favorite-ever Boston-area bands (sans the prog), The Vital Might (please go listen to their 2006 tune “Mist Of Crystals” all the way through, I beg of you, please do). These guys are right in the ballpark, and you absolutely must support them. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• This Friday, May 15, will bring with it a host of new albums, as nearly all Fridays do. But this Friday is a special one, given that college graduation season is starting to heat up, meaning that it’s time to have ChatGPT tweak your Claude-written resumé, so your Gemini AI can “target” jobs that are nearly all just fictitious “roles” created by corporate AIs for info-gathering purposes so they can send you car insurance spam, don’t you feel sooo special, in these final days of the human species? I sure do, but we’re not here to talk about that because too depressing, let’s just instead talk about all the recent music-release news that public relations AI bots have sent to my emailbox, like for instance Same Fangs, the new album from Wolf Parade/Moonface singer Spencer Krug, from Canada! Krug claims that the test-drive single, “Timebomb,” is “a song about a song about a band on tour, or rather, about the failed revision of that song, upon sadly realizing that its original message no longer rings true,” in other words it revolves around total bummer subjects, so the tune’s bummer vibe is apropos: The slow, redundant three-chord riff that composes 90 percent of the song is played on a piano with the distortion level set to Melvins, which actually makes it sound a lot more interesting and dangerous than it is, and so it actually works pretty well. Registered weird person Elbow Kiss guests on the track, which makes it a little less boring, but the net effect is like listening to two giant clams discussing their favorite acts at this year’s SXSW conference. That’s not necessarily to say I didn’t like it; I’ve heard a lot worse in just the past half-hour.

• OK, help me out, twerker people: Drake, is he in or is he out? My AI is waffling on the subject, so let’s please just move along to his new record, which is totally-not-ironically titled Iceman, like the book about the mafia contract killer guy! No, I’m sure it’s all just a misunderstanding, and besides, the publicity stunt meant to announce the release date of this album (yes, it’s officially been termed an album and not a mixtape) was a master stroke of nonsense that tapped into a rich vein of stupid in the corporate rap-pop world: Drake rented a hotel parking lot in Toronto and had a 25-foot wall of actual ice built there, and when it was finally melted by Toronto firefighters who were sick of getting yelled at by people who wanted their parking spaces back, there it was, the release date, May 15 (not to be out-stupided, Pitchfork interviewed an actual quantum physicist to predict when they’d be able to read the date)! Will this get any stupider? Yes, it is safe to assume so.

• Oklahoma-based emo-indie rockers All-American Rejects release their first album in 14 years, Sandbox, this week! The title track is catchy and weird and Van Halen-ish, and the video is even cooler, with fake Muppets committing R-rated acts of violence on the band. I approve of this message.

• And last, it’s Florescence, the new LP from British singing-songwriting waif Maisie Peters, who’s often described as sounding like Taylor Swift, which she doesn’t at all on this record’s first single, “Kingmaker,” more like a tween trying to sound like Gracie Abrams really. Mindless pastel patter for people who loved the Juno soundtrack.

Featured Photo: Slim Volume, Off The Grid and Toadies, The Charmer